16 Leaving Town

Similarities and Differences in Ancestral Pueblo Community Dissolution Practices in the Mesa Verde and Northern Rio Grande Regions

Michael Adler and Michelle Hegmon

Both authors of this chapter are privileged to have been part of Crow Canyon’s early years. Adler began work at Crow Canyon in 1983, and Hegmon began in 1986. Crow Canyon’s early focus on Sand Canyon Pueblo strongly influenced both of our subsequent research interests and is the primary reason we chose to contrast Sand Canyon Pueblo’s occupation with Pot Creek Pueblo, a roughly contemporaneous experiment in village life in the northern Rio Grande region.

Ancestral Pueblo communities in the Southwest have unique histories of occupation, settlement growth, and, in many cases, the departure of community members to other settlements both near and far. These unique trajectories, when compared across time and space, often display important parallels in the processes through which individuals and groups coalesced and subsequently moved. These similarities provide important avenues to broadening our understandings of how villagers contended with conflict, negotiated periods of resource scarcity, and experimented with social strategies and beliefs foundational to descendant Pueblo communities living in the Southwest today.

To that end we compare two large, relatively brief village occupations in the northern Southwest: Sand Canyon Pueblo and Pot Creek Pueblo (figure 16.1). Our comparison is guided by several basic questions: Where did the people come from before they aggregated and formed each village? How many people lived there, and for how long? What can we say about their social organization? Finally, what were the circumstances that brought each occupation to an end, and how did people leaving the settlements prepare various village spaces as part of their departure decision? Although the regional aftermath associated with the end of Sand Canyon Pueblo saw tens of thousands of Pueblo people leaving the central Mesa Verde region in the late thirteenth century AD, those leaving Pot Creek Pueblo likely moved a short distance into neighboring communities where some of their descendants still live today. Despite this significant difference, we want to emphasize the common foundations of how, when, and why these community members came together and subsequently moved to new places.

Black and white plan map of Pot Creek Pueblo — Figure 16.1. Plan map, Pot Creek Pueblo. Map adapted by Adler.

Building the Sites in Their Regional Contexts

Sand Canyon Pueblo

We begin with Sand Canyon Pueblo (5MT765), a large, late thirteenth-century AD settlement situated on the rim of a small canyon at the north end of Sand Canyon, in an area known as the “McElmo Dome” within the central Mesa Verde region. Sand Canyon Pueblo was excavated by Crow Canyon between 1984 and 1993 and reported in Kristin Kuckelman (2007); that report provides links to a bibliography of publications about the site and a detailed map. Most of what we discuss here is drawn from that report, Kuckelman (2010), and Scott Ortman and Bruce Bradley (2002).

Across the larger Mesa Verde region, sites such as Sand Canyon Pueblo with fifty or more structures or public architecture are community centers (see Glowacki et al., chapter 12 in this volume). Fifteen of these are known from the McElmo Dome study area, and they are regularly spaced (Ortman and Varien 2007). Overall, the central Mesa Verde region is estimated to have had a momentary population of 25,000 people by the mid-thirteenth century AD, making it one of the densest ancestral Pueblo occupations in the northern Southwest at that time. Some central Mesa Verde community centers include several sites that were used sequentially, and Sand Canyon Pueblo is part of such a complex. Community centers across the northern San Juan region display a variety of characteristics and histories (Glowacki 2015). Sand Canyon Pueblo is one well-known example, but it is not necessarily representative of the region as a whole. While it is unlikely that any one site be considered “typical,” William Lipe and Ortman (2000) document some commonalities in settlement layout for central Mesa Verde community centers.

Prior to about AD 1250, many central Mesa Verde community centers served dispersed communities with habitations scattered across the landscape, a community dynamic stretching back as far as the Basketmaker III period in this area (Schleher et al., chapter 10 in this volume). After that time, however, this dispersed settlement configuration was largely replaced with a highly aggregated settlement strategy, as the occupants of small sites moved into large community centers with defensive capabilities, including Sand Canyon Pueblo. This aggregation was part of a larger regional process as populations moved to areas—including the McElmo Dome—with good agricultural capabilities, resulting in population-resource imbalances and in some cases violence (Kohler et al., chapter 3 in this volume; Schwindt et al. 2016).

Demographic analysis concludes that the pre-AD 1250 population in the upper Sand Canyon locale was not nearly large enough to account for the post-AD 1250 population in Sand Canyon Pueblo. Thus, many households must have immigrated from elsewhere to join the Sand Canyon community (Ortman and Varien 2007; Schleher et al., chapter 14 in this volume). It is possible that those immigrants came from other parts of the larger northern San Juan region. Schleher et al. (chapter 14 in this volume) identify similarities in communities of practice in pottery production as one indicator that immigrants were most likely from the central Mesa Verde region, but specific source locations remain unknown.

Sand Canyon Pueblo is built of masonry and includes approximately 420 rooms, ninety kivas, a great kiva, and a D-shaped structure. The entire architectural complex was arranged in an arc around a plaza and spring and surrounded by a “massive” stone enclosing wall that incorporated a series of towers (Kuckelman 2010, 499). The enclosing wall was built in a single episode, and the various sets of rooms added within a few decades, indicating a planned and organized but not unitary construction (Ortman and Bradley 2002). Excavators estimate that it housed 400–600 people at the height of its occupation. The earliest construction at Sand Canyon Pueblo dates to about AD 1250, and construction continued in the 1260s until at least 1271. The latest tree-ring date is AD 1277vv, indicating some activity at the site until that year or shortly thereafter. Thus, Sand Canyon Pueblo was built, lived in, and depopulated over the course of about thirty years, and the final depopulation of Sand Canyon Pueblo was part of the final depopulation of the northern San Juan region in the early AD 1280s. Kuwanwisiwma and Bernardini (chapter 5 in this volume) support the interpretation that migrants moved into large settlements prior to the depopulation of the central Mesa Verde region.

Pot Creek Pueblo

Pot Creek Pueblo (LA260) is an ancestral Pueblo settlement in the Taos area of the northern Rio Grande region in New Mexico (figure 16.1). It was one of three large, aggregated villages founded in the Taos area during the thirteenth century AD; the other two—Taos and Picuris—are still homes to Northern Tiwa–speaking peoples today. Taos and Picuris community members recognize various cultural affiliations to Pot Creek Pueblo (Brown 1973; Fowles 2004).

Our archaeological understandings of Pot Creek Pueblo are based on field school excavations that started in the 1950s and continued until the early 2000s (Adler 2021; Arbolino 2001; Crown 1991; Fowles 2004). As was the case at Sand Canyon Pueblo—prior to the aggregation at Pot Creek Pueblo, Taos, and Picuris—the local population mostly lived in small, dispersed settlements in the Pot Creek drainage. However, in contrast to the settlement history of Sand Canyon Pueblo, Severin Fowles’s (2004) synthesis of the local settlement history established that in the early AD 1200s, prior to the major construction events at Pot Creek Pueblo, there was a tight cluster of nearly two dozen smaller unit pueblos within several hundred meters of where Pot Creek Pueblo would soon be built. By the early AD 1200s, at least 300–400 people lived in this cluster and likely comprised one part of the founding population of Pot Creek Pueblo; however, there is also evidence, detailed under “Community Social Organization,” that a portion of the Pot Creek Pueblo residents came from outside the Taos area (Fowles 2005). Furthermore, Crown et al. (1996) argue that northern Rio Grande community centers were largely built by peoples who had lived in aggregated pueblos elsewhere and were very familiar with the templates for site layout. A final difference is the scale of regional populations. Extensive regional survey in the Taos area (Fowles 2004; Herold and Luebben 1968; Woosley 1986) concludes that Taos region populations probably numbered 2,000–3,000 people, smaller than the central Mesa Verde region population by a factor of ten. Also, in contrast to Sand Canyon Pueblo, there is limited evidence that violence contributed to the founding of Pot Creek Pueblo. Rather, the aggregation into Pot Creek Pueblo and other large sites following a significant period of intercommunity conflict during the Valdez phase (AD 980–1200) may have quelled the earlier cycles of conflict in the Taos region.

Pot Creek Pueblo is built of coursed adobe comprising ten separate roomblocks, each containing between twelve and thirty-five ground-floor rooms (figure 16.1). Of the estimated 284 ground-floor rooms that have been mapped, 148 have been tested or fully excavated. While parts of the village architecture reached three stories, most of the structures were one to two stories, leading to an estimated 350–450 rooms. Population estimates vary depending on what proxy one uses to go from rooms to people. Based on architectural configurations of definable households (Arbolino 2001), population estimates fall between 400 and 500 individuals at the height of the Pot Creek Pueblo occupation in the early fourteenth century AD, about the same as Sand Canyon Pueblo. Roomblocks at Pot Creek Pueblo are built in definable episodes, with the majority of construction episodes containing three or fewer rooms, indicating that most of the site growth was based on the integration of household-level groups into existing architectural complexes.

At both Sand Canyon Pueblo and Pot Creek Pueblo, hundreds of living spaces were built, used, and ultimately emptied of human occupants over a span of decades, about three at Sand Canyon Pueblo (AD 1250–1280s) and six at Pot Creek Pueblo (AD 1265–1320s). At Sand Canyon Pueblo, construction spanned about two decades. At Pot Creek Pueblo, there were two major construction episodes. Pot Creek Pueblo’s first cutting date cluster is AD 1265, followed by an intense period of construction during the AD 1270s, and an isolated construction surge in the mid-AD 1280s. Construction slowed in the last decades of the thirteenth century AD, and there may have been a short-term relocation of part of the village population in the AD 1290s. The latest cutting date of AD 1319 from the great kiva at Pot Creek Pueblo indicates that people left the site in the early AD 1320s.

Community Social Organization

Many eastern Pueblo communities, including those at Taos and Picuris, have clearly delineated dual organizations (Fox 1967; Ortiz 1969; Parsons 1936; Ware 2014). Ortiz’s (1969) detailed explanation of Tewa dual organization at Ohkay Owingeh serves as the template for Rio Grande Pueblo moiety structure, but as Fowles (2005) argues, the historical contingencies of these organizational structures must be considered as well. Evidence for dual organization is evident at both Sand Canyon Pueblo and Pot Creek Pueblo, although to different degrees.

At Sand Canyon Pueblo the architectural layout of the household clusters as well as the overall site configuration argue for multiple social organization groupings. The settlement has two separate halves divided by a small drainage, two ritual structures, a D-shaped building, and a great kiva, all suggestive of dual organization (Kuckelman 2007). However, both ritual structures are in the same (west) half of the site. Furthermore, there are also about ninety small kivas at Sand Canyon Pueblo, suggesting that ritual was organized at multiple scales, including household as well as possibly moiety- or site-wide. We suspect that the principles of dual organization were just beginning to emerge at Sand Canyon Pueblo.

Evidence for dual organization is much stronger at Pot Creek Pueblo. Severin Fowles (2013) links the foundations of dual organization found at both Taos and Picuris Pueblos to the ancestral occupation at Pot Creek Pueblo and the conjoining of historically separate peoples who occupied Pot Creek. Fowles points to architectural layout, room features, and ceramic evidence to argue that at least two groups with differing settlement histories and cultural identities occupied the village, and immigrants originated from areas to the south, in and around present-day Espanola and Santa Fe, New Mexico. He proposes that there was an early conjoining of southern groups with existing agrarian populations in the Taos area, reflected in the different layouts of late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century AD surface pueblos. Fowles (2004) associates L-shaped site configurations with the later immigrants into the Taos region and the C-shaped roomblock configurations with the autochthonous groups resident in the Taos area. Fowles (2013) dates this possible immigration from the Tewa area to sometime in the late twelfth century AD, whereas Adler (in prep) dates the immigration to the later thirteenth century. Temporal differences aside, there is consensus that the dual social organization at both Taos and Picuris Pueblos finds its roots in the joining of local and nonlocal peoples at Pot Creek Pueblo and possibly concurrently in the other Taos region community centers. Recent reinterpretations of the ancestral architecture, site layout, and presence of great kivas at Picuris Pueblo support a long history of dual organization at that settlement as well (Adler in prep).

A second important difference between Sand Canyon Pueblo and Pot Creek Pueblo is indicated by the number and distribution of small kivas and thus how they were used and what role they played in household and suprahousehold ritual activity. At Sand Canyon Pueblo, residents built one kiva for every 4–5 surface rooms; the ratio at Pot Creek Pueblo is 70–100 rooms per kiva. There is strong evidence that the Sand Canyon Pueblo small kivas were household-level facilities used for both domestic and ritual activity (Kuckelman 2010). In contrast, the small kivas at Pot Creek Pueblo would have been used by, and associated with, multihousehold ritual and social groups (Adler 1993). Both communities have several ritual structures that are much larger than these small kivas, so there may have been a more consistent use of these larger structures as community-level ritual spaces at both villages.

Leaving Town: Out-Migration and Closure

The final depopulations of Sand Canyon Pueblo in the AD 1280s and Pot Creek Pueblo in the AD 1320s involve major differences in reasons for emigration as well as similarities in how people decommissioned their lived spaces. Kuckelman (2010) detailed how conditions changed in the last few years of occupation at Sand Canyon Pueblo by comparing material from general middens to what she calls “abandonment” contexts. She found a shift toward reliance on wild resources, including wild plants, cottontail, and deer, likely necessitated by decline in maize production in the late AD 1270s and the onset of the Great Drought starting in AD 1276. By this time, the two large, public buildings (the D-shaped structure and great kiva) were no longer in use. Pot Creek Pueblo occupants may have been less directly affected by the Great Drought, given the relatively high elevation (7,600 ft.) of the settlement and lower overall population density in the Taos area, though, due to the limited sampling strategies employed in early excavations at the settlement, we do not have high-resolution floral and faunal data to support this interpretation empirically.

Soon after the onset of the Great Drought, Sand Canyon Pueblo was attacked. Many rooms, mostly small kivas, were burned, and at least thirty-five people died, probably killed in the attack (Kuckelman 2010, 502, 509). The survivors did not rebuild but left Sand Canyon Pueblo and probably the region. Many rooms contained de facto refuse, indicating that they did not take much with them (Kuckelman 2010, 502). Assuming the population estimate for the site (400–600 people) is correct and that most were still resident at the site at the time of the attack, there would have been hundreds of survivors.

Although the details are complex and fill many volumes, it is clear that the northern San Juan region was almost entirely depopulated by AD 1285 and that many of the people who left moved to the northern Rio Grande (Glowacki 2015; Ortman 2012). Kuckelman’s analysis of Sand Canyon Pueblo kivas shows that seventeen of twenty-four (“abandonment categories” “2, 3, and 4” in 2010, table 1) were used until the end of the site’s occupation, in the AD 1270s or possibly early AD 1280s. Thus, the final depopulation of Sand Canyon Pueblo—after the attack—coincides with the final depopulation of the region. More than 12,500 tree-ring dates are reported for the northern San Juan region, and none postdates AD 1281, indicating that the region was depopulated shortly after that date.

The survivors who left Sand Canyon Pueblo around AD 1280 would have been part of a large stream of migrants, many moving to the northern Rio Grande, where they and their descendants reorganized their society and changed much of their material culture (Ortman 2012). It is not possible to say exactly where the people who left Sand Canyon Pueblo went, or to know if they maintained their community, although genetic evidence summarized by Kuckelman (2010) indicates some similarities between Sand Canyon Pueblo and people at sites on the Pajarito Plateau and at Pecos Pueblo. It is clear that the people who left Sand Canyon Pueblo moved a long distance, likely hundreds of kilometers away. Despite that present interpretations of Pot Creek Pueblo identify immigrants as coming from the Tewa Basin to the south, it is not out of the realm of possibility that some of these migrants originated in or around the central Mesa Verde region.

In contrast to the violent end at Sand Canyon Pueblo, there are no indications of open conflict, raiding, or violent death at Pot Creek Pueblo. Furthermore, the people who left Pot Creek Pueblo stayed in the area, moving to either Picuris or Taos Pueblos, each only 16 km from Pot Creek Pueblo. It is possible others may have returned to the Tewa Basin, particularly those who appear to have immigrated to the Taos area in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries AD. The dearth of de facto refuse in the rooms at Pot Creek Pueblo indicate a short-distance move, one in which all usable, portable items could have been taken to their new home. Oral accounts from members of Taos Pueblo and relating to Pot Creek Pueblo identify past groups such as the Water People who migrated into the area, conjoining with groups having different histories in and around the area (Fowles 2005, 2013). Pot Creek Pueblo is identified in oral traditions as Taïtona, the place of the Water People. These traditional histories agree that various peoples with different identities, and likely different locations of origin, coalesced at Taïtona, and archaeological lines of evidence discussed in the preceding sections align with those histories.

Structure Decommissioning

We end our comparison with a discussion of commonalities in structure decommissioning. Although the two settlements were depopulated amidst quite different conditions, with deadly conflict at Sand Canyon Pueblo and the out-migration of tens of thousands of people compared to no evidence of conflict and very short-distance relocation of Pot Creek Pueblo villagers, there are transregional, shared practices of leaving one’s village. Specifically, at both sites there is evidence of deliberate room closure through burning.

Although an attack that left at least thirty-five dead is associated with the end of Sand Canyon Pueblo, there is evidence that the survivors did not simply flee. Rather, they deliberately burned at least some rooms at the site to establish some degree of closure before joining the migration stream that left the region. Specifically, as Kuckelman (2010, 519–520) describes, sometime after the attack the roofs of many kivas were burned. These were made of earth-covered logs and would not have burned easily or accidentally, even if touched by raiders’ torches. Rather, it is more likely that they were deliberately burned either by surviving residents or by friendly nearby neighbors.

Evidence of room decommissioning by burning has been documented in various surface and subsurface structures throughout Pot Creek Pueblo. Unlike patterns at sites with well-documented destruction in which entire blocks of rooms were consumed by fire (e.g., Chodistaas Pueblo [Whittlesey and Reid 2019]), structure burning at Pot Creek Pueblo is spatially spotty. Of the nearly 150 rooms partially or completely excavated at the site, 62 show evidence of partial or complete destruction through burning (figure 16.1). Evidence for burning includes oxidization and reduction of adobe walls, charred structural timbers, and carbonized corn and other botanical materials on room floors.

A second important pattern emerging from excavations of surface architecture at Pot Creek Pueblo is that very few of the rooms appear to have been trash filled, meaning that the rooms were in use, or were viable living spaces, at the time the major occupation of the site ceased, probably sometime around AD 1320–1325. Of the rooms excavated, two signatures dominate the archaeological deposits. The first signature is a nearly complete lack of either primary or secondary deposits in the surface rooms. Although these empty rooms may have been used as storage spaces during the active occupation of the site, it is also possible that the rooms were cleaned out during and after the primary occupation of the site ceased in the early fourteenth century AD.

The second signature at Pot Creek Pueblo is the presence of large amounts of stored corn and associated domestic artifacts, commonly associated with a significant level of burning, in a number of the rooms. Subsurface architecture was also terminated through the use of fire at Pot Creek Pueblo. Four small subterranean kivas and a single great kiva have been excavated. All four kivas show evidence that their final treatment involved burning but only after having been prepared for their fiery decommissioning. The great kiva, according to Ronald Wetherington (1968), was not burned, but he also argues that construction of the great kiva was never fully completed.

All indications point to a planned decommissioning of lived spaces at Pot Creek Pueblo including the purposeful placement of items best understood as offerings in various rooms and kivas, and the intentional burning of many of these same spaces. More detailed interpretations of these contexts indicate that these final acts were not wonton destruction or the result of violent raiding. In fact, the use of fire and fire products, particularly ash, are common prophylactics used not only across Pueblo and non-Pueblo cultures in the American Southwest but also many other areas across the world (Adler in prep; Roth and Adams 2021). Specifically, ethnographic groups utilizing fire as a protectant do so to shield these spaces from witches or other malevolent individuals possessing supernatural means to defile lived spaces and create imbalance, illness, and evil throughout the worlds of the living and the dead (Darling 1998; Walker 1998).

Conclusions

When we began work at Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in the 1980s, there were precious few archaeological projects contending with questions of social agency, multiethnic community histories, or the inclusion of oral traditional perspectives from descendant populations. Research generated at the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center over the past four decades has been seminal in making these approaches part of our understandings of the past, and Crow Canyon research continues to forge new perspectives on both ancestral and descendant Indigenous peoples in the American Southwest.

In keeping with this research tradition, we have emphasized a range of interesting parallels and significant contrasts in this comparison of Pot Creek and Sand Canyon Pueblos. These two villages became large population centers in two distant regions within about a decade of one another and rapidly reached similar maximal populations of 400–500 people.

Both settlements drew from locally dispersed smaller settlements as well as migrants from elsewhere, though at Pot Creek Pueblo there is clearer evidence of both local and nonlocal peoples coalescing. Neither settlement was long lived; Pot Creek Pueblo lasted about sixty years (AD 1260–1320), several decades longer than Sand Canyon Pueblo (AD 1250–1280). Both communities apparently embraced dual organization as an overarching social organizational strategy, although such organization may have been in its early stages at Sand Canyon Pueblo. Households were also important organizational units at both settlements, but there were major differences in use of small kivas. At Sand Canyon Pueblo one or sometimes several kivas are part of nearly all household architectural units, whereas at Pot Creek Pueblo kivas are much less common and would have been shared by at least several households.

The two communities, which saw very different ends, still decommissioned their architecture in similar ways. At both, once people decided to leave, they put some or many of their lived spaces to the torch. What we might misinterpret as destruction and final desecration is better understood as part of a pan-Pueblo practice that allows one to leave home and ritual spaces by protecting these places with fire and protecting the ancestors who still occupy the village.

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